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As they face a changing market for journalistic content, Australian news organisations are increasingly forced to experiment with new approaches to telling their stories. The Australian Twitter News Index (ATNIX) for July 2017 shows that some new formats for investigative reports can generate considerable engagement – but old-fashioned commentary and opinion pieces also still manage to attract an audience.

Most notably, on 10 July 2017 ABC News records a significant increase in the number of tweets sharing its articles; this is due entirely to political editor Chris Uhlmann’s strident criticism of the Trump administration (2,700 tweets that day), published from the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hamburg. Given the strong and well-documented international response to Uhlmann’s comments, the article actually receives fewer tweets than we might expect – republished or excerpted in text and video by news outlets around the world, Twitter users did not necessarily need to go searching for the original piece.

The presence of two special reports – long-form investigative reporting that is presented in a format distinct from ordinary ABC News articles – is especially noteworthy here. We’ve seen these appear from time to time, and the inclusion of two such dossiers in ABC News’ most shared articles during July clearly shows the strong public response to this form of content. Amidst considerable staff cuts in the commercial media, the public broadcaster is now one of the last major news organisations in Australia that is still able to conduct complex investigative reporting on key public interest issues – and the response on Twitter indicates that the national news audience is rewarding such efforts with its engagement.

We should not read too much into short-term snapshots of public attention to the content offered by different news outlets, but here, too, it is striking that two of the top five SMH articles in July were opinion pieces. In light of their well-publicised economic difficulties, it would not be surprising if Fairfax outlets focussed increasingly on comparatively inexpensive-to-produce commentary, while ceding yet more of the business of investigative journalism to ABC News and other publications. Longer-term trends in content production and audience engagement will see such strategies emerge more clearly.

Meanwhile, overall trends in news readership – as opposed to active engagement through tweeting – show a picture of stability during July. Our Hitwise data on the total number of visits to each news site by Australian Internet users see ABC News well ahead of nearest rivals Nine News and The Age for the second month in a row; this extends an unexpected decline especially in Nine News’ numbers since the end of May. news.com.au and the Sydney Morning Herald still remain well ahead of the pack, however, and their comparative market dominance seems unlikely to change any time soon.

It is also notable that at a domestic level, ABC News does not record a major increase in visits as a result of Chris Uhlmann’s G20 piece on 10 July; this points clearly to the fact that most of the additional attention to that article came from overseas. Twitter may have played its role in the viral dissemination of Uhlmann’s criticism; but, as we now know from subsequent coverage, mainstream reporting and republishing of Uhlmann’s views by major U.S. and U.K. outlets soon followed.

Standard background information: ATNIX is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites (even if those links have been shortened at some point). Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude the non-news sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). Data on Australian Internet users’ news browsing patterns are provided courtesy of Hitwise, a division of Connexity. This research is supported by the ARC Future Fellowship project “Understanding Intermedia Information Flows in the Australian Online Public Sphere”.

Last month’s Australian Twitter News Index (ATNIX) saw a comparative return to a focus on domestic matters. Twitter users predominantly shared links to Australian news media stories that dealt with federal politics and related issues. June largely continues that trend, with one notable exception: unsurprisingly, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s secretly recorded attempt at impersonating Donald Trump at the midwinter press ball also attracted considerable international attention.

As the news outlet that broke the story, via veteran political editor Laurie Oakes, Nine News profits most prominently here: its post of the leaked video racks up more than 11,000 tweets during 15 and 16 June alone. Overall sharing of Nine’s news content rapidly returns to long-term average of 1,000 to 1,500 tweets per day, however: isolated scoops clearly do not have the capacity to affect well-established patterns of audience attention for more than a few days.

Our Hitwise data on the total number of visits to the leading Australian news and opinion sites depicts a similar picture of stability. Here, too, Nine News receives a brief boost as it posts the leaked video of Turnbull in mid-June; even so, ABC News just manages to pull ahead of Nine and claim third spot in the overall ranking of most visited Australian news sites for the month.

This strong showing for the national broadcaster also reflects a much longer-term trend: in recent years, total site visits to The Age and the Daily Mail have declined slightly, while visits to Nine News have stagnated; conversely, ABC News has continued to grow and is likely to claim its place as the third most visited Australian news site for good.

Over the short term, except for Turnbull’s Trump impersonation it is remarkable that in spite of the considerable global instability caused by Brexit, Trump, the concerns over Syria and North Korea, and various other trouble spots, the news stories from Australian outlets that are widely shared in the Twittersphere deal largely with domestic matters again.

This indicates, at least in part, that we have now incorporated these daily uncertainties into our everyday lives, and no longer feel a need to share new news stories about them on a day-by-day basis. At the same time, though, those of us who still monitor these situations closely are also more likely to share news from closer to the source – for example, from outlets based in the U.S. or U.K. – rather than wait for Australian media to recapitulate the latest developments.

Standard background information: ATNIX is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites (even if those links have been shortened at some point). Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude the non-news sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). Data on Australian Internet users’ news browsing patterns are provided courtesy of Hitwise, a division of Connexity. This research is supported by the ARC Future Fellowship project “Understanding Intermedia Information Flows in the Australian Online Public Sphere”.